Future Ready
What must Japan do to ensure that its workforce can compete in a digital world?
We’ve been living in a digital world for quite some time. More than three decades have passed since the World Wide Web began connecting us through zeros and ones. For most of that time, it’s been possible to straddle the line between digital and analog. But if the first quarter of 2023 has made anything clear, it’s that we’re at an inflection point when it comes to technology.
If Japan is to remain globally competitive and secure its future economy, it must embrace digital transformation (DX).
Despite increased efforts to push DX, Japan dropped to 29th place in the 2022 IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking, an annual report published by the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development that assesses and compares the digital competitiveness of countries based on their ability to adopt and explore digital technologies.
More concerning is that Japan ranked 41st in the talent subcategory and 54th in future readiness.
Overcoming this digital talent gap is a must. For companies, the required skill sets are shifting, impacting not only talent acquisition and retention, but also the country’s education system and overall workplace culture.
To find out where Japan is on the road to readiness, The ACCJ Journal spoke with corporate leaders making DX possible, as well as those helping companies and talent come together for success in today’s digital-driven world.
Widening Gap
Talent acquisition has become a pressing issue for companies across Japan. In a 2022 survey conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), 67 percent of Japanese respondents cited a shortage of information and communications technology (ICT) personnel as a roadblock to their DX efforts.
Surveys conducted by recruitment site Doda show a sharp rise in the monthly number of job openings per candidate for engineers and other tech professionals—from 3.44 in March 2019 to 9.54 in March 2022. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) projects a shortage of 450,000 ICT workers by 2030.
“We have a big problem. It’s a serious talent crisis that is going to get much worse,” said Daniel Bamford, associate director of technology for Asia–Pacific at specialized recruitment agency Robert Half Japan.
Changing Workplace
Faced with a dwindling talent pool and fierce competition, the Japanese labor system must change within a few years if Japanese companies are to acquire good talent, Megumi Tsukamoto, senior adviser at global consultancy J.S. Held Japan LLC, told The ACCJ Journal. The country’s traditional human resources model, according to which compensation is based on age and seniority, has exacerbated the digital talent shortage.
A 2016 comparative survey by METI found that the average annual salary of ICT personnel in Japan was roughly half that of their US counterparts. Workers in their twenties in the United States earned an average of $77,990 per year, while their Japanese counterparts took home just $31,300.
“Workers in their twenties in the United States earned an average of $77,990 per year, while their Japanese counterparts took home just $31,300.”
Tsukamoto noted that, in a bid to obtain and retain talent, some Japanese companies are beginning to offer salaries two to three times higher than previous packages. Some are offering much more than that. This is the result of ICT professionals either moving abroad, or choosing to work for such foreign companies in Japan as Google.
However, higher salaries are just one piece of the puzzle, said Victoria Ryo, associate director at Robert Half. In-demand ICT tech workers expect more.
“A company that provides workplace flexibility, along with benefits, interesting projects, and an international environment, is going to be more attractive,” she explained.
Ryo pointed to innovative initiatives that catch the attention of potential ICT workers. As an example, she mentioned the financial services organization Money Forward’s Culture Hero campaign, which awards employees who epitomize the company’s inclusive culture. But Bamford warns that a good diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy is not enough to attract these in-demand talents.
“For them, it’s a base expectation, not something that will win them over,” he said. “But if you’re not providing a diverse and inclusive environment, you will lose people.”
Looking Abroad
To address the domestic talent shortage, companies such as Fujitsu Japan Limited have accelerated plans to hire non-Japanese engineering researchers in the wake of recent mass layoffs in the US tech sector.
While skepticism remains that ICT workers from abroad can thrive in Japanese workplaces, where language—and sometimes insufficient DEI culture—remains a barrier, Tsukamoto cites Mercari, Inc. as a domestic player that has found success hiring international talent.
The thriving e-commerce company began its full-scale efforts to recruit overseas talent in 2018. Today, more than 50 foreign nationals are working at Mercari’s Tokyo office, according to their FY2022 sustainability report.
Last year, the company opened a subsidiary in Bengaluru, a hub for IT companies in southern India, with the goal of recruiting IT workers. As of last July, it had attracted 45 new graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology.
The school has been a popular source of tech talent for Japanese companies such as Rakuten Group, Inc., whose Bengaluru base grew from six engineers in 2014 to more than 1,000 in 2020.
The Japanese government has responded to this trend by launching two new visa schemes in April that target highly skilled foreign workers, such as researchers and engineers, as well as graduates of highly ranked universities.
The Japan System for Special Highly Skilled Professionals, or J-Skip, visa allows researchers, engineers, and business managers to bypass the points-based system used to award visas to skilled professionals.
Meanwhile, the Japan System for Future Creation Individual, or J-Find, visa allows graduates from highly ranked universities to live in the country for up to two years while they find employment.
Evolving Workforce
The Japanese government also pledged last October to spend ¥1 trillion over the next five years on reskilling workers to address the shrinking pool of tech talent.
In January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that guidelines will be drawn up in June to increase labor market flexibility to encourage workers to move to high-growth sectors.
Major companies are also contributing. Amazon Web Services Japan G.K. (AWS) has invested more than ¥1.3 trillion to help its Japanese customers modernize their IT systems and to overcome their digital skills gap through education programs, training, and certification.
“Cloud and cybersecurity skills will be the two most sought-after digital skills by Japanese employers by 2025,” said James Miller, the company’s head of public policy. “AWS has trained over 400,000 individuals in Japan with cloud skills since 2017, providing them with in-demand skills and best practices to help learners and organizations innovate in the cloud.”
Miller—an American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) governor who also serves as co-chair of the chamber’s Digital Transformation Committee and vice-chair of the Secure Digital Infrastructure Committee—shared an example of how AWS extended a 21st-century hand to a 19th-century company.
In 2021, the company helped Toppan Printing Co., Ltd., the 122-year-old Japanese global juggernaut, embark on a full-scale digital transformation. More than 1,600 of its employees received AWS training over three months and 1,050 pursued AWS certifications in a single year.
Room for Movement
As businesses make DX a point of emphasis, having a range of skill sets has become more important. In terms of hard skills, such as cloud and DevOps, Bamford noted that recruitment has gone from a T-shaped model, where someone has broad awareness and one deep specialization, to a V-shaped one, where the candidate’s deep specialization is complemented by medium-depth knowledge in other areas.
“The other side is that the soft skills aspect is really focused on being able to bridge global and local, while also bringing technical and people skills,” he added.
While senior managers who can lead a company’s DX efforts are in demand, companies should look inward for potential employees who they can elevate, according to Bamford. He pointed to a client that was looking for a certified ScrumMaster and, rather than hiring someone already at that level, found success in ambitious young candidates who the company could train to be certified.
“Since there will be that much more demand, and that much more shortage, the secret is to unlock the skill sets of the people you currently have. Experience is nice, but learning mindsets are even better.”
“Since there will be that much more demand, and that much more shortage, the secret is to unlock the skill sets of the people you currently have. Experience is nice, but learning mindsets are even better,” he added.
Ryo noted that this can help companies retain their technical talent. “I think the number one reason people leave an organization is because they don’t feel they have the opportunity to grow.”
Preparing Future Generations
While reskilling offers companies a path to overcoming current DX issues, Japan’s new ¥10 trillion national endowment fund to boost research at universities in strategic priorities such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, and quantum technology is expected to help train the next generation.
However, Matthew Wilson, dean and president of Temple University, Japan Campus, believes that changing student mindsets is arguably more important to reversing the tech talent drain.
He contrasted students in the United States, who define their future goals by jobs they want to pursue, with Japanese students, who aspire to work for specific companies.
“If your goal is to work at a company, your pathway is going to be a lot different,” he said, noting that the practice of job rotations at Japanese companies, in which employees are transferred from department to department every few years, provides fewer incentives to focus on specific fields.
Wilson also noted that Japan’s public education system is “very conservative, which is difficult to change,” but is optimistic that the government’s push for DX and the advent of new AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, the conversational large language model developed by OpenAI, will accelerate change.
“It’s going to force people to educate differently and to assess differently,” Wilson said. “The point isn’t catching somebody who just did their essay with ChatGPT. Rather, it’s how to educate somebody so they have the skills and the knowledge they’re going to need for a job five years down the road.”
Unified Response
Steps have been taken to reshape the country’s education system with last year’s release of the Roadmap on the Utilization of Data in Education. A joint statement issued by the Digital Agency, MIC, METI, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology states that, by 2030, the government aims to create “a society where anyone can learn in their own way, anytime, anywhere, with anyone.”
While Wilson recalls similar government ambitions, such as former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s “one student, one computer” initiative more than two decades ago, which had little success, he is optimistic about the Digital Agency and Minister Taro Kono, whom he praises for being “energetic and constantly finding ways to challenge processes and procedures.”
But he also noted that, while things are starting to move, “it’s going to take a while to get Japan to the digital utopia that they’ve been talking about for 25 years.”